The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful CEOs Hall of Shame

Eric Jackson
, ContributorI write about technology and media.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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John Chambers:

A decade ago, Chambers was a "rock star" CEO. His appearances on CNBC were major events. Business media used to hang on his comments during earnings calls as indicators of where the economy was heading.

But something started to happen to Cisco after the dot-com bubble burst and the company was no longer the most valuable in the world. Chambers went on a buying spree. He went into at least 30 different "market adjacencies" over the course of his purchases. Several of the most expensive ones took Cisco into the consumer space -- something far different from selling routers and network infrastructure. Cisco bought home routers, Web-based anti-virus software, web conferencing software, Cable TV boxes, and video cameras. Last April, Chambers admitted in an internal memo that Cisco had lost its way with too many consumer acquisitions and that they would get back to their core business.

From the day Cisco bought Flip in March 2009 until today, its stock is only up 30% while the Nasdaq is up 103%.

Meg Whitman:

Meg Whitman was constantly celebrated for eBay's rise to Internet stardom in the late 90s. However, in 2005, Whitman made the odd decision to buy Skype for what would later turn out to be over $4 billion.

At the time, she said:

"By combining the two leading e-commerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leaders in Internet voice communications, we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the Net."

It turned out that there were no synergies between the marketplace and payments businesses and the phone business. What was worse, when eBay later sold Skype to an investor group, they realized that they didn't actually own the intellectual property rights to the software which they'd paid the $4 billion for. They had to cut a special deal with Skype's founders, in order to get the deal done.

From the day eBay bought Skype until today, eBay's stock is down 15% while the Nasdaq is up 33%.

Habit #2: They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests

CEOs sometimes get the lines blurred between what's good for them personally and what's good for their companies. If they are successful, they conclude that's good for the company. However, a lot of times, CEOs can spend an extraordinary amount of time or company money on things that they are interested in but which lack a clear benefit to the company itself. They assume that pursuing something that's good for them will be good for the company -- or at least do their company no harm. Here are some egregious examples:

Jim Balsillie:

Balsillie was the co-CEO for Research In Motion (RIMM) who recently stepped down after his company's stock price dropped by 70% last year. Part of the reason for the sharp decline is that the BlackBerry's US market share went from 44% to 9% in a year. Apple's (AAPL) iPhone was introduced in January 2007. In hindsight, it changed the game to where users expected first rate software and an unlimited numbers of "apps" in their smart phones, whereas they'd previously only wanted an email retrieval service. RIM was unable to move quickly enough to adapt to the new market expectations.